Category: publishing

Norma Khouri is continuing to deny that her poignant book Forbidden Love was fabricated. Her publisher defended her, saying “we spoke with her today and impressed upon her that it was imperative to provide evidence. She said she is working on it.” Meanwhile, the government of Australia is “investigating her for making false declarations in her application for an Australian residence visa.”

Why is it that characters in modern literature always seem to have an extensive knowledge of plants, shrubs, and trees? A girl can’t turn around in a book these days without gazing upon some collection of milkweed, sopwort, and bladder campion, but honestly, who knows the names of these greenish things in the real world? Russell Smith is a bit jealous of the breadth of such characters’ knowledge, but he’s also more than a bit suspicious of the literary license being taken. “It just doesn’t make sense, unless she is a botanist or a farmer. I still think it’s just showing off.”

“The U.S. and Australian publishers of a best seller in at least 15 countries about a Jordanian honor killing have canceled the book, questioning the story’s authenticity. Norma Khouri’s Forbidden Love had been the subject of an extensive newspaper investigation.”

Novelist Jane Smiley has had nine letters to the editor published in the New York Times in the past four years. Considering the Times gets about 1000 letters a day, that’s quite a record. How does she do it? “Depending on what’s going on in the world, I send them a letter every day. Some days I send two.”

Improbably, US presidential candidate John Kerry has been reciting poetry oon the campaign trail. “Although there isn’t a strict separation between the worlds of presidential politics and poetry, they don’t collide with great frequency these days. And Kerry’s use of Let America Be America Again, a poem written by the late Langston Hughes, represents a head-on collision.”

America’s 9/11 commission report has become an instant bestseller. “At least 50 million hits have been recorded on the Web site of the Sept. 11 commission. Meanwhile, another 200,000 copies of the book version of the commission’s report on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have been ordered, bringing the total in print to 800,000.”

A new magazine “n+1” launches. “They’re pushing literary fiction … in ways that aren’t obviously commercial but are simply based on exquisite writing and writerly insight. The magazine is dissatisfied with the coarsening public discourse. ‘We live in a time when a magazine like Lingua Franca can’t publish, but Zagat prospers’.”

The Australian publishers of Norma Khouri’s controversial book, Forbidden Love, have withdrawn the book from sale and advised booksellers to do the same after doubts surfaced about whether the bestseller’s tale is true as claimed…

Norma Khouri’s frightening story of fleeing her Middle Eastern homeland in fear for her life became a worldwide bestseller. But now she is being attacked and her story branded a fake. “Far from being a Jordanian who fled her home in the late 1990s after the “honour” killing of her best friend, Khouri is accused of being an American passport-holder who lived in Chicago from the age of three.”

Considering their importance in literary history, there’s relatively little scholarship being done on realist authors. Postmodern suspicion of any claim to be able to represent reality is only part of the problem. “Realist works tend to be forthright and explicit, so there’s less of an overt challenge for scholars to ‘crack’ them. Nor is it that easy to get students to crack the novels.”